Education should be something that’s available and practical for everyone – regardless of an individual’s age, background or finances.
That’s the ethos of online higher education provider FutureLearn. They provide online courses to anyone curious enough to keep learning, in subjects ranging from physics and French to big data and microbiology.
Arch Creative won a competitive pitch to create an online campaign with a two-fold purpose: to increase general awareness of the platform, driving overall sign-ups and to encourage user conversion from the free FutureLearn content to paid, premium courses.
We developed a series of course-based creatives, to really nail down a target audience and entice them into courses which would be genuinely interesting (based on their personal tastes) or genuinely helpful based on what they did for a living). Taking an image of an everyday, ordinary learner, we changed their appearance in the glow of the FutureLearn platform to reflect something to do with the course we were advertising.
Ad for a course in medieval history? We’d switch the central character for a knight in chainmail. Classic literature course? Our hero suddenly becomes Jane Austen. We paired this imagery with some clever copy that focused on the ways particular courses could be viewed in a positive or negative light – in other words, boosting the interest in the subject by making anything seem controversial.
The FutureLearn campaign was primarily social, allowing us to help with accurate targeting and personalised advertising. That being said, it was an incredible opportunity to design a wide-ranging campaign that stretched across different media with slightly differing messages.
